Steve Jurvetson has already proven himself in Silicon Valley as an alpha venture capitalist. Among his many successful bets was Hotmail, the e-mail service acquired by Microsoft back in 1997, making e-mail free for the masses and cementing Jurvetson's reputation as a high-tech seer.

Venture capitalists look for startups like Hotmail because these companies are disruptive - they blow up existing markets and create big new money-making opportunities.

Fast-forward a decade and Jurvetson is making dramatically different bets. He's funding startups in electronics, nanotechnology, clean technology and life sciences that borrow techniques from biology to obtain more precise control over matter.

Jurvetson has a bachelor's in electrical engineering from Stanford (which he finished in 2 1/2 years) and once designed chips for Hewlett-Packard.

So he's well aware that current chip-designing techniques are reaching their limits. It's harder to pack more memory onto current processors, and memory is a bottleneck-already, he said, Intel processors spend 85 percent of their time churning while they wait for memory.

He also says he believes that disruptive technologies of the future are more likely to be recognized by venture capitalists who understand science. One startup he invested in, ZettaCore, synthesized a molecule similar to chlorophyll that binds to a metal atom - the molecules assemble themselves relatively simply into low-power memory chips.

"The human brain is 100 times more efficient in calculation than the best computers," he said. "It just shows you how much headroom there is (for new companies with new techniques)."

So Jurvetson is learning biology and organic chemistry, and he builds rockets in his spare time.

Jurvetson spoke Tuesday with two Chronicle reporters at Draper Fisher Jurvetson's offices on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park about where the big companies of the future might come from.

He was excited, talked fast, interrupted himself to draw pictures and leaped from subject to subject. Here are some excerpts from the conversation.

Where he looks for disruptive technologies: "One source is if you're on a path of exponential progress, like Moore's Law, that's already coupled to something growing exponentially and tends to be disruptive to business as usual.

"Another source is a creative idea, something that nobody has ever thought of before. As the world becomes more democratic for ideas (though) ... the chances of any one person having a breakthrough idea are less and less likely.

"But if a breakthrough technology requires you to simultaneously be an expert in genetics and computer science, that dramatically lowers the number of people on the planet who can have that idea.

"If an organic chemist looking at a semiconductor problem has an insight, there's a higher likelihood Intel hasn't thought about it.

"As an investor, when we look for disruptive change, we often look for weird cross-pollinations of talent. That's why nanotech is so interesting, also synthetic biology and a lot of other fields. A lot of these companies if not all, or almost all, have a key insight that's some weird combination across academic disciplines that hadn't been thought of before."

Where he invests: Jurvetson has made three bets on memory chip companies - ZettaCore, which synthesized the chlorophyll-like molecule; Nanterro, which is working on chips based on carbon nanotubes that don't lose memory when power goes off; and a third company, Coatue, that was acquired by AMD.

"We never got to see how great it might become," he said of Coatue. "A startup has to be around long enough to make change happen."

But he also sees companies like these as "a steppingstone to something big." ZettaCore's molecule, for instance, was first designed to be part of a solar cell.

"Imagine precise control over matter at nanoscale - you could make a darn good battery," he said. "So we have companies ... that are using nanostructured, super rough surface areas to make better cathodes for a battery ... and looking at self-assembling solar cells on cheap substrates like aluminum foil.

"Another major avenue is re-engineering microbes themselves to do work ... so the nanotech investing team morphed slowly into bio-nano, which was most interesting to me, and then into synthetic biology and re-engineering microbes."

One recent investment in that area was Genomatica in San Diego, which modifies cells so they manufacture industrial chemicals.

How he manages risk: "For us, a natural starting point is close to markets we know something about. Semiconductors are familiar to us, so there's a bias within our operation on where nanotech would happen first. It's not necessarily the best place to start, but saying that I kind of think it is.

"Medical applications are happening but they take longer to percolate through, so there's less product on the market ... especially if they're therapeutic.

"With electronics there's no regulatory risk, or relatively no risk. Molecular memory chips are safer than the arsenic and phosphene gases used every day in chipsets, and all this stuff is covalently bound in a package and hermetically sealed. You could make a pound and it would last you all year.

"It's so different from other regulatory domains, like bulk materials for skin cremes ... We haven't invested in anything like that. It's too scary.

"Also, making bulk material is not a great business. Often it's a commodity, and those companies have learned over hundreds of years how to compete with no real basis of competition - bundling products or sending football tickets to the purchasing manager. It's harder to enter as a new company."